Items tagged with Office365

The cloud storage market is hotly competitive, and amid the dustup between various providers, consumers are winning. The latest win for us is that Microsoft announced that it’s slashing the cost for its OneDrive cloud storage service by a whopping 70% and offering better freebies, too. Every OneDrive user gets 15GB of cloud storage for free--up from 7GB--and the cost for Microsoft’s paid plans are suddenly quite low. You can get 100GB of storage for $1.99 or 200GB for $3.99. For comparison, the old prices were $7.49 and $11.49 per month, respectively. Finally, Office 365 subscriptions...Read more...

There was a moment there when new Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella had to decide if the company would push its Office 365 product out to as many platforms as possible, thus ensuring maximum adoption for its software, or withhold one of its most valuable assets and leverage that to boost its hardware sales. Nadella chose the former option, and thus we have Office for iPad. (Our review is here.) Reports indicate that sales are going swimmingly, resulting in 12 million downloads, but in a bid to pump up sales even further, Microsoft rolled out a whole new Office 365 tier called “Office 365 Personal”....Read more...

Microsoft appears close to releasing the cloud-based Office 365 version of its ever-popular suite of Office applications for Mac and iOS devices, according to several reports. For Office 365 subscribers, this news is a huge boon, as it would allow them to use the software on a greater variety of devices. A Microsoft representative admitted to MacWorld that a new Office for Mac, which hasn’t been updated since 2011, was indeed in the works for this year, and Reuters’ sources say that full iPhone and iPad versions are finished and are merely awaiting the greenlight from new Microsoft...Read more...

In some cases, it's best to build your own. In other cases, it's best to just partner with the market leader. Microsoft is leaning towards that latter option this week as it pertains to the latest Office 365 addition, with a new DocuSign partnership destined to bring eSignature support to its flagship cloud product. It's a long-term deal that should make the process of signing documents shuffled around in the Office world that much easier. And, instead of having to leave the Office 365 ecosystem, you'll be able to submit authorized signatures right from within. The app will be tightly integrated...Read more...

Microsoft has taken its time creating touch-optimized versions of Microsoft Office for iPads, Android tablets, and even its own Windows tablets, but the wait may nearly be over--for iPad users. Originally, the Windows tablet version was scheduled to debut before the iPad version, for obvious reasons, but ZDNET’s Mary Jo Foley believes that the opposite will be true. “But I hear Ballmer and the senior leaders of the company may have had a change of heart towards the end of last year,” she wrote. “According to one of my contacts, Ballmer OK'd the suggestion by the Office team...Read more...

You can hardly find a job posting that doesn’t list proficiency with Microsoft’s suite of Office tools as a requirement, and Word, Excel, and PowerPoint are ubiquitous in schools and business around the world. Thus, it makes sense for colleges and universities to provide students with access to Office, but of course Office licenses cost a good bit of money even as Microsoft moves its iconic Office suite to the cloud with Office 365. To defray the cost for schools, Microsoft has launched its Student Advantage program that allows educational institutions who subscribe to Office 365 ProPlus...Read more...

Microsoft announced that its Office Web Apps, the teaser portion of its Office 365 initiative, are getting some updates in the form of real-time co-authoring, which allows multiple users to collaborate on a single document simultaneously. Users can work from their desktops, laptops, tablets, and other mobile devices whether online or offline. (Even if you’re working offline on a shared document, your changes will sync when you reconnect.) Further, some of the Office Web Apps received individual updates. The Word app has improved formatting, find and replace, more styles and formatting for...Read more...

Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer wrote a lengthy email and memo to the company today detailing a new direction for Microsoft, including a massive reorganization and revamped focus. Primarily, Microsoft will no longer operate as a series of islands, with many departments all working on different projects; instead, under the banner of “One Microsoft”, the company’s many groups will all contribute holistically to developing products and services. Microsoft will be organized according to function, so the major groups will be: “Engineering (including supply chain and datacenters),...Read more...

Microsoft announced updated versions of its OneNote note-taking app for iOS and Android, which follows hot on the heels of the launch of Office Mobile for iPhone. However, unlike the latter, the former isn’t reliant (necessarily) on an Office 365 subscription. You can simply download the app and tie it to a free Microsoft account. Of course, OneNote is also available for Windows Phone 8 and Windows 8 devices as well as on the web. Microsoft says that new features include a consistent experience across all devices, including text formatting, shading and borders in tables, consistent support...Read more...

Despite the fact that Microsoft and Apple are competitors in the mobile space--Surface versus iPad and Windows Phone 8 versus iOS--and Apple is winning that battle handily, Microsoft has bigger fish to fry: The company announced that its new Office Mobile for iPhone is now available on iOS for the iPhone and iPad. The catch is that users must be Office 365 subscribers, so it’s not as though this is a suite of standalone Office apps that are optimized for mobile devices; rather, it’s an extension of one’s cloud-based Office 365 subscription. That said, free app does allow you to...Read more...

When it comes to distributing software, Microsoft and Adobe are certainly on the same page insofar as they both believe that software-as-a-service is the future; it’s only a matter of time before boxed software is a thing of the past. However, the two companies apparently differ sharply on the timing of the move. Earlier this week, Adobe announced that it would discontinue its Creative Suite and other CS products, so going forward any new customers will have to rely on the Creative Cloud, which requires a subscription-style membership as opposed to the purchase of a physical software box....Read more...

Earlier this week, we reported that it appeared as though Microsoft had changed language in the EULA for Office 2013 that would trap your license on one PC forever. This was a stark departure from EULAs for past version of Microsoft Office that allowed users to move their software licenses to new computers. The Age was the first to notice that peculiarity, and now ComputerWorld has confirmed it via emails to and from Microsoft: Once you activate your Office 2013 license on a given PC, that license is tied to that PC forever. If you want to have Office 2013 on a different PC at any point and for...Read more...

Either someone at Microsoft screwed up the language in the licensing agreement for Microsoft Office 2013, or the company really, really wants everyone to switch to an Office 365 subscription instead of the locally-installed version of the software. The Age spotted some confusing language in the Office Home & Student 2013 license agreement that appeared to limit the installation to a single computer. Mind you, that’s not one computer at a time, but one computer--ever. This is similar to the OEM licensing model, which marries Office with whatever machine it ships on forever. Of course,...Read more...

Microsoft's own second quarter was a good one; the company reported total sales of nearly $70 billion ($69.94B). Operating and net income stood at $27.16B and $23.15B, up 13 percent and 23 percent over the same period in 2010. Interestingly enough, the company's major growth areas were in the combined Entertainment / Mobile division where strong Kinect uptake and a successful Windows Phone 7 launch pushed revenue to $1.49B, up 30 percent over 2010. The company is often portrayed as an Office + Windows behemoth whose other projects lose money. While it's true that those two areas generate the vast...Read more...